A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction, and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as short selling, leverage, and derivatives. Financial regulators generally restrict hedge fund marketing to institutional investors, high net worth individuals, and accredited investors.
Prime brokerage is the generic term for a bundled package of services offered by investment banks, wealth management firms, and securities dealers to hedge funds which need the ability to borrow securities and cash in order to be able to invest on a netted basis and achieve an absolute return. The prime broker provides a centralized securities clearing facility for the hedge fund so the hedge fund's collateral requirements are netted across all deals handled by the prime broker. These two features are advantageous to their clients.
A "fund of funds" (FOF) is an investment strategy of holding a portfolio of other investment funds rather than investing directly in stocks, bonds or other securities. This type of investing is often referred to as multi-manager investment. A fund of funds may be "fettered", meaning that it invests only in funds managed by the same investment company, or "unfettered", meaning that it can invest in external funds run by other managers.
Bridgewater Associates, LP is an American investment management firm founded by Ray Dalio in 1975. The firm serves institutional clients including pension funds, endowments, foundations, foreign governments, and central banks.
Tiger Management Corp., also known as "The Tiger Fund", is an American hedge fund and family office founded by Julian Robertson. The fund began investing in 1980 and closed in March 2000/01. It continues to operate today in direct public equity investments and seeding new investment funds.
David Frederick Swensen was an American investor, endowment fund manager, and philanthropist. He was the chief investment officer at Yale University from 1985 until his death in May 2021.
An alternative investment, also known as an alternative asset or alternative investment fund (AIF), is an investment in any asset class excluding stocks, bonds, and cash. The term is a relatively loose one and includes tangible assets such as precious metals, collectibles and some financial assets such as real estate, commodities, private equity, distressed securities, hedge funds, exchange funds, carbon credits, venture capital, film production, financial derivatives, cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens, and Tax Receivable Agreements. Investments in real estate, forestry and shipping are also often termed "alternative" despite the ancient use of such real assets to enhance and preserve wealth. Alternative investments are to be contrasted with traditional investments.
Jacob Ezra Merkin is an American investor, hedge fund manager and philanthropist. He had been a fund manager and capital raiser until 2008 when one of the funds in Gabriel Capital LP, his $5 billion group of hedge funds became insolvent because a large portion of its assets was invested with the convicted Ponzi scheme operator Bernard Madoff. The fallout from his investment with Madoff has been extensive. He navigated a series of lawsuits without a finding of fraud or knowledge of the scheme, but agreed to repay any fees earned from the investment in Madoff historically. He had to resign a series of positions including his role as non-executive chairman of GMAC.
Harry M. Markopolos is an American former securities industry executive and a forensic accounting and financial fraud investigator.
The bias ratio is an indicator used in finance to analyze the returns of investment portfolios, and in performing due diligence.
The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former Nasdaq chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Participants in the Madoff investment scandal included employees of Bernard Madoff's investment firm with specific knowledge of the Ponzi scheme, a three-person accounting firm that assembled his reports, and a network of feeder funds that invested their clients' money with Madoff while collecting significant fees. Madoff avoided most direct financial scrutiny by accepting investments only through these feeder funds, while obtaining false auditing statements for his firm. The liquidation trustee of Madoff's firm has implicated managers of the feeder funds for ignoring signs of Madoff's deception.
Risk parity is an approach to investment management which focuses on allocation of risk, usually defined as volatility, rather than allocation of capital. The risk parity approach asserts that when asset allocations are adjusted to the same risk level, the risk parity portfolio can achieve a higher Sharpe ratio and can be more resistant to market downturns than the traditional portfolio. Risk parity is vulnerable to significant shifts in correlation regimes, such as observed in Q1 2020, which led to the significant underperformance of risk-parity funds in the Covid-19 sell-off.
MARHedge was a semi-monthly financial newsletter and the most prominent publication focusing on the hedge fund industry for most of its history which circulated between 1994 and 2006. It was originally distributed under the name HEDGE and has also gone under the name Managed Account Reports LLC. The newsletter stopped distribution in November 2006 after Euromoney Institutional Investor’s acquired MARHedge.
Hedge fund replication is the collective name given to a number of different methods that attempt to replicate hedge fund returns. The hedge fund industry has boomed over recent years and various studies by investment banks as well as academic papers have shown that hedge funds may be nearing an alpha generating capacity constraint. This means hedge funds can no longer produce alpha in aggregate. Replication has been claimed to remove the illiquidity, transparency and fraud risk associated with direct investment in hedge funds. With the belief that the pursuit of alpha is a zero-sum game, more investors are looking to simply add "Hedge Fund Beta" to their portfolio. These early investors have been rewarded as the replicators outperformed their direct investment cousins in 2008 due to their greater liquidity and lower use of leverage.
Lars Jaeger is a Swiss-German author, entrepreneur, financial theorist, and alternative investment manager. He writes on the history and philosophy of science, technology, and has in the past been an author on hedge funds, quantitative investing, and risk management. In his widely read blog as well as other media he frequently writes on issues concerning scientific developments, new technologies, and their meaning for society. He is the author of many books on various topics. In 2014, Jaeger published a universal history of science, and in September 2016 a book on the interplay of science and spirituality. His next book "Supermacht Wissenschaften" outlines scenarios of mankind's technological future. His 2018 book "The Second Quantum Revolution - From Entanglement to Quantum Computing and Other Super-Technologies" deals with the latest quantum technologies. His 2019 book "Mehr Zukunft wagen" is a confrontation with the impending technological upheavals that lead to what Jaeger calls “The Human Crisis”. In 2020 he published "Sternstunden der Wissenschaft. A Success Story of Thinking" in which he describes the triumph of science on the basis of four essential intellectual virtues. His 2021 book "Ways Out of the Climate Catastrophe - Ingredients for a Sustainable Energy and Climate Policy" provides an outlook on a possible climate-friendly economy of the future. In 2022 Jaeger published two books: 1. "Emmy Noether - Her rocky Path to the topf of Mathematics" and 2. "The Stumbling Progress of 20th Century Science - How Crises and Great Minds Have Shaped Our Modern World". The first gives a biography - readable also for non-mathematicians - of the greatest female mathematician in history. The second books describes the revolutionary development of ALL sciences from around 1880 to 1950.
Returns-based style analysis is a statistical technique used in finance to deconstruct the returns of investment strategies using a variety of explanatory variables. The model results in a strategy's exposures to asset classes or other factors, interpreted as a measure of a fund or portfolio manager's investment style. While the model is most frequently used to show an equity mutual fund’s style with reference to common style axes, recent applications have extended the model’s utility to model more complex strategies, such as those employed by hedge funds.
Michael Dever is an American businessman, futures trader, entrepreneur, and author. Dever is the founder and CEO of Brandywine Asset Management, Inc., an investment management firm founded in 1982, and he is the author of the best-selling investment book "Jackass Investing: Don't do it. Profit from it."
Brandywine Asset Management, Inc. is an American investment management firm founded and managed by Michael Dever. The firm is registered as a commodity trading advisor.
Access International Advisors and Marketers, a Securities and Exchange Commission-registered investment advisor and a hedge fund of funds, was a research analyst investment agency that specialized in managing hedged and structured investment portfolios that involve commercial physical and biological research. It was a feeder fund into the securities firm of Bernie Madoff, as part of the Madoff investment scandal.
